B, the scale is different. All of those players hit hundreds of home runs in the majors

Wait what? The most common retort to people acting like Harper is to “act like you’ve been there before”. Now you are saying that those who’ve been there before can act like this because they’ve been there? Well which is it?

And the comments about other players isn’t to say that it never happens. It happens all the time. Why complain about it? As someone famous once said, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Players act like asses all the time, why do we expect them not to?

Most players are not guilty of the same behavior. In fact, the vast majority of players are not guilty of the same behavior.

We get it: he’s young, brash, and makes mistakes. No one is advocating locking him up in prison for 20 years. The general consensus is that he shouldn’t act like such a jackass.

But he also wants us to care about him as a baseball player, right? Otherwise there’s no one to play his salary

Why can’t they be mutually exclusive? I’m a Yankees fan, and I couldn’t care a lick what type of people they employ. Why? Because I’m sick of having the media trump up a person to be the second coming of the Green Knight only to have the same faults we all do, and then that same media takes way too much glee in tearing that person down.

Realize they all have faults, they all have good points, just like the rest of us and move on.

You seem to be proposing that we *not* criticize a teenager for doing something he shouldn’t do; how does he learn then?

Not at all, because as I mentioned above, most players are guilty of the same behavior but how many of them get all this criticism?

But he also wants us to care about him as a baseball player, right? Otherwise there’s no one to play his salary. So that gives us the right to express our preferences about how he plays. There has never been a paradigm in sports in which fans at large enjoy the pure talent of the players without paying any attention to the players as individuals. In fact, that would be kind of absurd. What would give sports meaning if we couldn’t sympathize with the players?

This is typical of how we, as fans, view all athletes. If they don’t fit into the pretty little picture we want of them, well you get the comments like above. If we really like the person, we push their social issues into the closet (Jordan’s infidelity and gambling issues, Jeter’s actions towards Arod, etc). If we can’t stand the person, you pick them apart piece by piece.

He’s a teenager, he’s not trying to solve world hunger. He’s not trying to cure cancer. He wants to play baseball. Just let him.”

AMEN! AMEN!

By the way, I think a lot of them manipulate the thumbs up/thumbs down thing. You can add as many as you like simply by disabling the cookie/cache option in your browser.

Either way, like I said before, I don’t pay attention nor care anymore.

Thanks for the stats on drug abuse. Next time I light a fatty and toss back some bourbon, I’ll try to determine if I’m the one of six OR part of the other five of the six. Addiction is a bitch but she’s my bitch.

20 thumbs up….3 thumbs down.

BC, I’m not sure where you’re at this days but you’re missed. It may be a violation for me to do so, but in such dire circumstances I am left with no choice:

Bryce Harper, you are a chipwich. Not just any chipwich, but the King Sultan Master Supreme Potentate of all chipwiches.

And the guy rarely gets shouted down for “holding the minority opinion.” He gets shouted down for being a dick about it, whatever his opinion.

By the way, just an FYI. The Charlie Manual hour long show is on today on WIP from 12:00 to 1:00 today with Anthony and Glen in case you can get near a radio or stream it on the internet today. Awesome to listen to Charlie for an hour.